How America Went Gayby Charles W. Socarides, M.D.

[COMMENT: A clear, accurate, and brief history of how
America Went "Gay".

Dear reader, the powers that be, the globalist crowd, are able
to determine to a fairly precise degree what will and will not be taught in our
government-run schools. They own the media and many if not most
politicians. They own must of world-wide commerce. The success of
homosexualization could happen only with their permission, or more likely, their
command. This whole program, like the so-call Muslim threat, is being
fostered, to a great degree, by these people. Both the homosexual
population and the Islamic population is too dysfunctional to mount any global
threat by themselves.

The book by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, After the Ball, referred to below, is a classic in the
exposition of evil - deliberate subversion of truth to attain ends not
attainable in the light of day. It is a mainstay of homosexualist
strategy.

See also Socarides' book, Homosexuality: a
Freedom Too Far.

E. Fox]

Charles W. Socarides, M.D., is clinical professor of
psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center in
New York. He is president of the National Association for Research and Therapy
of Homosexuality, and author of Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far (Adam
Margrave Books, Phoenix, Arizona).

For more than 20 years, I and a few of my colleagues in the field of
psychoanalysis have felt like an embattled minority, because we have continued
to insist, against today's conventional wisdom, that gays aren't born that way.
We know that obligatory homosexuals are caught up in unconscious adaptations to
early childhood abuse and neglect and that, with insight into their earliest
beginnings, they can change. This "adaptation" I speak of is a polite term for
men going through the motions of mating not with the opposite sex but with one
another.

For most of this century, most of us in the helping professions considered
this behavior aberrant. Not only was it "off the track"; the people caught up in
it were suffering, which is why we called it a pathology. We had patients, early
in their therapy, who would seek out one sex partner after another-total
strangers-on a single night, then come limping into our offices the next day to
tell us how they were hurting themselves. Since we were in the business of
helping people learn how not to keep hurting themselves, many of us thought we
were quietly doing God's work.

Now, in the opinion of those who make up the so-called cultural elite, our
view is "out of date." The elite say we hurt people more than we help them, and
that we belong in one of the century's dustbins. They have managed to sell this
idea to a great many Americans, thereby making homosexuality fashionable and
raising formerly aberrant behavior to the status of an "alternate lifestyle."

You see this view expressed in some places you would least expect. The Pope
says same-sex sex is wrong, but a good many of his own priests in this country
(some of whom are gay themselves) say the Pope is wrong. Indeed, in much of
academe and in many secondary school classrooms gays are said to lead a new
vanguard, the wave of the future in a world that will be more demographically
secure when it has fewer "breeders" (which is what some gay activists call
heterosexuals these days).

How did this change come about? Well, the revolution did not just happen. It
has been orchestrated by a small band of very bright men and women-most of them
gays and lesbians-in a cultural campaign that has been going on since a few
intellectuals laid down the ideological underpinnings for the entire tie-dyed,
try-anything-sexual Woodstock generation. In various ways, Theodore Reich,
Alfred Kinsey, Fritz Perls, Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman
preached a new countercultural gospel: "If it feels good, do it."

It was all part of a plan, as one gay publication put it, "to make the whole
world gay." I am not making this up. You can read an account of the campaign in
Dennis Altman's The Homosexualization of America. In 1982 Altman,
himself gay, reported with an air of elation that more and more Americans were
thinking like gays and acting like gays. There were engaged, that is, "in
numbers of short-lived sexual adventures either in place of or alongside
long-term relationships." Altman cited the heterosexual equivalents of gay
saunas and the emergence of the swinging singles scene as proofs that
"promiscuity and 'impersonal sex' are determined more by social possibilities
than by inherent differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals, or even
between men and women."

Heady stuff. Gays said they could "reinvent human nature, reinvent
themselves." To do this, these reinventors had to clear away one major obstacle.
No, they didn't go after the nation's clergy. They targeted the members of a
worldly priesthood, the psychiatric community, and neutralized them with a
radical redefinition of homosexuality itself. In 1972 and 1973 they co-opted the
leadership of the American Psychiatric Association and, through a series of
political maneuvers, lies and outright flim-flams, they "cured" homosexuality
overnight-by fiat. They got the A.P.A. to say that same-sex sex was "not a
disorder." It was merely "a condition"-as neutral as lefthandedness.

This amounted to a full approval of homosexuality. Those of us who did not go
along with the political redefinition were soon silenced at our own professional
meetings. Our lectures were canceled inside academe and our research papers
turned down in the learned journals. Worse things followed in the culture at
large. Television and movie producers began to do stories promoting
homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle. A gay review board told Hollywood how
it should deal or not deal with homosexuality. Mainstream publishers turned down
books that objected to the gay revolution. Gays and lesbians influenced sex
education in our nation's schools, and gay and lesbian libbers seized wide
control of faculty committees in our nations' colleges. State legislatures
nullified laws against sodomy.

If the print media paid any attention at all, they tended to hail the gay
revolution, possibly because many of the reporters on gay issues were themselves
gay and open advocates for the movement. And those reporters who were not gay
seemed too intimidated by groupthink to expose what was going on in their own
newsrooms.

And now, what happens to those of us who stand up and object? Gay activists
have already anticipated that. They have created a kind of conventional wisdom:
that we suffer from homophobia, a disease that has actually been invented by
gays projecting their own fear on society. And we are bigots besides, because,
they say, we fail to deal with gays compassionately. Gays are now no different
than people born black or Hispanic or physically challenged. Since gays are born
that way and have no choice about their sexual orientation, anyone who calls
same-sex sex an aberration is now a bigot. Un-American, too. Astoundingly now,
college freshmen come home for their first Thanksgiving to announce, "Hey, Mom!
Hey, Dad! We've taken the high moral ground. We've joined the gay revolution."

My wife, Clare, who has an unerring aptitude for getting to the heart of
things, said one day recently in passing, "I think everybody's being
brainwashed." That gave me a start. I know "brainwashing" is a term that has
been used and overused. But my wife's casual observation only reminded me of a
brilliant tract I had read several years ago and then forgotten. It was called
After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the
1990's, by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen.

That book turned out to be the blueprint gay activists would use in their
campaign to normalize the abnormal through a variety of brainwashing techniques
once catalogued by Robert Jay Lifton in his seminal work, Thought Reform and
the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China.

In their book Kirk and Madsen urged that gay activists adopt the very
strategies that helped change the political face of the largest nation on earth.
The authors knew the techniques had worked in China. All they needed was enough
media-and enough money-to put them to work in the United States. And they did.
These activists got the media and the money to radicalize America-by processes
known as desensitization, jamming and conversion.

They would desensitize the public by selling the notion that gays
were "just like everyone else." This would make the engine of prejudice run out
of steam, i.e., lull straights into an attitude of indifference.

They would jam the public by shaming them into a kind of guilt at
their own "bigotry." Kirk and Madsen wrote:

All normal persons feel shame when they perceive that they are not thinking,
feeling, or acting like one of the pack....The trick is to get the bigot
into the position of feeling a conflicting twinge of shame...when his
homohatred surfaces. Thus, propagandistic advertisement can depict
homophobic and homohating bigots as crude loudmouths....It can show them
being criticized, hated, shunned. It can depict gays experiencing horrific
suffering as the direct result of homohatred-suffering of which even most
bigots would be ashamed to be the cause.

The best thing about this technique, according to Kirk and Madsen: The bigot did
not even have to believe he was a loathsome creature:

Rather, our effect is achieved without reference to facts, logic, or proof.
Just as the bigot became such, without any say in the matter, through
repeated infralogical emotional conditioning, his bigotry can be alloyed in
exactly the same way, whether he is conscious of the attack or not. In
short, jamming succeeds insofar as it inserts even a slight frisson of doubt
and shame into the previously unalloyed, self-righteous pleasure. The
approach can be quite useful and effective-if our message can get the
massive exposure upon which all else depends.

Finally-this was the process they called conversion-Kirk and Madsen predicted a
mass public change of heart would follow, even among bigots, "if we can actually
make them like us." They wrote, "Conversion aims at just this...conversion of
the average American's emotions, mind, and will, through a planned psychological
attack, in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media."

In the movie "Philadelphia" we see the shaming technique and the conversion
process working at the highest media level. We saw Tom Hank's character
suffering (because he was gay and had AIDS) at the hands of bigots in his
Philadelphia law firm. Not only were we ashamed of the homophobic behavior of
the villainous straight lawyers in the firm; we felt nothing but sympathy for
the suffering Hanks. (Members of the Motion Picture Academy felt so much
sympathy they gave Hanks an Oscar.) Our feelings helped fulfill Kirk and
Madsen's strategy: "to make Americans hold us in warm regard, whether they like
it or not."

Few dared speak out against "Philadelphia" as an example of the kind of
propaganda Kirk and Madsen had called for. By then, four years after the
publication of the Kirk-Madsen blueprint, the American public had already been
programmed. Homosexuality was now simply "an alternate lifestyle." Best of all,
because of the persuaders embedded in thousands of media messages, society's
acceptance of homosexuality seemed one of those spontaneous, historic turnings
in time-yes, a kind of conversion. Nobody quite knew how it happened, but the
nation had changed. We had become more sophisticated, more loving toward all,
even toward those "afflicted" with the malady-excuse me, condition.

By 1992 the President of the United States said it was time that people who
were openly gay and lesbian should not be ousted from the nation's armed forces.
In 1993 the nation's media celebrated a huge outpouring of gay pride in
Washington, D.C. Television viewers chanted along with half a million marchers,
"Two, four, six, eight! Being gay is really great." We felt good about
ourselves. We were patriotic Americans. We had abolished one more form of
discrimination, wiped out one of society's most enduring afflictions:
homophobia. Best of all, we knew now that gay was good, gay was free.

Excuse me. Gay is not good. Gay is not decidedly free. How do I know this?
For more than 40 years, I have been in solidarity with hundreds of homosexuals,
my patients, and I have spent most of my professional life engaged in exercising
a kind of "pastoral care" on their behalf. But I do not help them by telling
them they are O.K. when they are not O.K. Nor do I endorse their "new claim to
self-definition and self-respect." Tell me: Have we dumped the idea that a man's
self-esteem comes from something inside himself (sometimes called character) and
from having a good education, a good job and a good family-and replaced that
notion with this, that he has an affinity to love (and have sex with) other men?

In point of fact, many of my patients had character; they had an education;
they were respected ad men and actuaries and actors. But they were still in
pain-for one reason and one reason alone. They were caught up in this mysterious
compulsion to have sex with other men. They were not free. They were not happy.
And they wanted to see if they could change.

Over the years, I found that those of my patients who really wanted to change
could do so, by attaining the insight that comes with a good psychoanalysis.
Others found other therapies that helped them get to the bottom of their
compulsions, all of which involved high motivation and hard work. Difficult as
their therapeutic trips were, hundreds and thousands of homosexuals changed
their ways. Many of my own formerly homosexual patients-about a third of
them-are married today and happily so, with children. One-third may not sound
like a very good average. But it is just about the same success rate you will
find at the best treatment centers for alcoholics, like Hazelden in Minnesota
and the Betty Ford Clinic in California.

Another third of my patients remain homosexual but not part of the gay scene.
Now, after therapy, they still have same-sex sex, but they have more control
over their impulses because now they understand the roots of their need for
same-sex sex. Some of these are even beginning to turn on to the opposite sex. I
add this third to my own success rate-so that I can tell people in all honesty
that my batting average is .667 out of more than a thousand "at bats."

Of course, I could bat .997 if I told all my patients in pain that their
homosexuality was "a special call" and "a liberation." That would endear me to
everyone, but it would not help them. It would be a lie-despite recent pieces of
pseudo-science bolstering the fantasy that gays are "born that way." The media
put its immediate blessing on this "research," but we were oversold. Now we are
getting reports, even in such gay publications as The Journal of
Homosexuality, that the gay-gene studies and the gay-brain studies do not
stand up to critical analysis. (The author of one so-called "gay-gene theory" is
under investigation by the National Institutes of Health for scientific fraud.)

I was not surprised to hear this. My long clinical experience and a sizable
body of psychoanalysis research dating all the way back to Freud tell me that
most men caught up in same-sex sex are reacting, at an unconscious level, to
something amiss with their earliest upbringing- overcontrolling mothers and
abdicating fathers. Through long observation I have also learned that the
supposedly liberated homosexual is never really free. In his multiple, same-sex
adventures, even the most effeminate gay was looking to incorporate the manhood
of others, because he was in a compulsive, never-ending search for the
masculinity that was never allowed to build and grow in early childhood.

When I tried to explain these dynamics to the writer who helped me put
together a kind of popular catechism on homosexuality, I found he had a hard
time understanding what this "incorporation" meant. He said, "Your patient would
be more manly if he took in the penis of another man? Sounds a little dumb.
Would I run faster if I ate the flesh of a deer?"

I told him, "You have to understand that we are talking about feelings that
come from deep in the unconscious mind. They are very primitive. In fact, if you
have ever read any Indian lore, you may remember that Indians would, in fact,
eat the flesh of a deer in order to become faster afoot. To us, that is a very
primitive idea. But it had a mythic significance for a young Iroquois brave. And
Madison Avenue still makes use of such mythic meanings. The ad people sell us
things based on the notion that we will become what we eat or drink or possess."
The point I was making was this: We do not understand same-sex sex until we
realize that the dynamics involved are unconscious.

This is one reason why psychoanalysis is the tool that gets us to the heart
of everything. Once my patients have achieved an insight into these dynamics-and
realized there is no moral fault involved in their longtime and mysterious need-they
have moved rather quickly on the road to recovery. Their consequent gratitude to
me is overwhelming. And why shouldn't it be? They were formerly caught up in
compulsions they could not understand, compulsions they could not control. Now
they are in charge of their own lives.

Their former promiscuity may have looked a lot like "liberation." But it was
not true freedom. It was a kind of slavery. And it was not a lifestyle. With the
onset of AIDS, as the playwright and gay militant Larry Kramer said in a 1993
interview, it turned out to be a death style. I have had some patients tell me,
"Doctor, if I weren't in therapy, I'd be dead."

Testimonials from my recovered patients make me feel my work is
worthwhile-despite regular demands from the gay rights community for my silence.
What would they have me do? Pack my bags, find a new profession, lock up a
lifetime of research and analysis, hide my truth under a bushel? It is not my
psychoanalytic duty to tell people they are marvelous when they are out of
control, much less ask disingenuous rhetorical questions like, "What kind of God
would afflict people with an 'objective disorder' in the disposition of their
hearts?"

Giving God the credit for their gayness is a persistent refrain in much gay
literature today, and I am saddened to see people of evident good will become
unwitting parties to the blasphemy. Gays ascribe their condition to God, but he
should not have to take that rap, any more than he should be blamed for the
existence of other man-made maladies-like war, for instance, which has proven to
be very unhealthy for humans and for all other living things. God does not make
war. Men do.

And, when homosexuality takes on all the aspects of a political movement, it,
too, becomes a war, the kind of war in which the first casualty is truth, and
the spoils turn out to be our own children. An exaggeration? Well, what are we
to think when militant homosexuals seek to lower the age of consensual sexual
intercourse between homosexual men and young boys to the age of 14 (as they did
in Hawaii in 1993) or 16 (as they tried to do in England in 1994)? In the
Washington March for Gay Pride in 1993, they chanted, "We're here. We're queer.
And we're coming after your children."

What more do we need to know?

[This article first appeared in America (November 18, 1995). Used by
permission of the author.]